“Ready, team?” Hink said when he met us outside his office ten minutes later, dressed in athletic gear, the walking embodiment of Kip Dynamite when he went to meet LaFawnduh at the bus stop. All of us tried very, very hard not to laugh at his sweatband-and-knee-high-socks combo. At least I wouldn’t be the most ridiculous-looking person on the field.

Hink walked with us to the football field, where the rest of our teachers were already warming up, stretching and practicing passes.

“God, this is horrifying,” Suki said. “No high schooler is ever meant to see their teachers in these kinds of positions.”

“If this were a movie,” I said, grimacing at the sight of our motley crew, “we’d be the underdogs who overcome great personal shortcomings to win this entire tournament at the end. Like DodgeBall.”

“Yeah, I somehow don’t think dodging wrenches is going to help you much,” Grace said. “You guys are screwed.”

“Tsk, tsk. Ye of little faith,” I said as I copied Hink’s stretches without him noticing, which made Suki double over with laughter.

“More like ye of practicality,” Grace said. She nodded toward the other end of the field. “That’s who you’re playing.”

As it turns out, it was much more like DodgeBall than first anticipated, but without the happy ending. Instead of enrolling us in the Beginners or even Intermediate tier of recreational football, Hink had slotted us into the Advanced category, mostly (only) because Suki Perkins-Mugnai had played before and he thought that would be enough to get us through.

The opposing team was composed entirely of gym teachers and lightly injured star athletes from Rockwood High, who all looked remarkably similar to the Mountain That Rides from Game of Thrones. They’d been playing (and winning) together for so long that they’d even invested in legit uniforms, black T-shirts emblazoned with red anatomical hearts being crushed by a hand.

The game went pretty much how I expected it to go. Grace sat on the bleachers, waving a pom-pom attached to her cane to cheer us on as the Gutcrushers lived up to their name. (Our team name, thanks to Hink, was still “Hi, Maria, can we decide on this later and get back to you?”) Most of the opposing team were either ex or current football players and frequently forgot the “touch” aspect of the game and went in for tackles instead.

The first time he was thrown the ball, Buck looked at it, looked up at the stampede coming in his direction, said, “Oh hell no,” turned around, and bolted. We didn’t see him again.

I tried to touch the ball as little as possible and would always feed it through to Suki, who really was the only person who knew what she was doing. She scored our only two touchdowns, both of which the Gutcrushers were extremely unhappy about despite the fact that they were already slaughtering us.

Hink was like a newborn gazelle that hadn’t quite yet learned to walk. Beady sprained her ankle after being on the field for seven minutes. My math teacher, Mr. Hotchkiss, seemed to hate me more during the game than he did in class, which was the exact opposite of my motivation to be there. And then, when the hell was nearly over and poor Suki looked close to death from carrying our entire team against a horde of wildebeests, I accidentally found myself with the ball and no one to pass it to.

The impact made the horizon shift sideways in a violent tilt. One moment I was standing, panicking about what to do with the stupid ball, the next I was on the ground, unable to breathe.

“Sorry, dude, momentum,” said the giant who’d plowed me over as he grabbed my arm and pulled me off the ground, which I suppose was meant to be friendly, but since I was winded, all I could do was flop my free hand in his general direction. “You guys should probably think about dropping down to Intermediate. Or Beginners.”

Grace was, naturally, cackling her evil laugh as I stumbled toward the bleachers, sure at least some of my ribs were broken. I kept stealing glances at her as I staggered across the field, but there wasn’t even a shadow of the manic stranger she’d been at the track Tuesday night.

“Never. Ever. Again” were the first words I said to her once I’d regained the ability to speak.

After the Gutcrushers were through macerating us, Hink took us all out to dinner to apologize for what, in the end, had amounted to little more than a ritual sacrifice: sixteen touchdowns to two. What made the hell worth it, though, was sitting next to Grace at dinner. She was in one of the better moods I’d ever seen her in, playful as she teased me for being unable to eat my sushi with chopsticks, and wondering aloud if we’d ever see Buck again or if he was pulling a Forrest Gump and still running.

Hotchkiss even remarked that I wasn’t doing as well as Sadie had in math class and I really needed to start handing in my homework if I wanted to scrape a pass, so that was nice. Maybe he was finally starting to get the message that we weren’t the same person and I wasn’t likely to light firecrackers under his desk.

In the end, we made a pact to go to our graves without ever playing recreational football again, so the bruises and mild concussion were almost worth it for several more hours with Grace on a Good Day.

FRIDAY

We met in the library in the morning before homeroom, me with the pagination folded and tucked under my arm, her with a thermos and two delicate teacups with Alice in Wonderland illustrations on them and little tags on the handle that read Drink me. Lola had finally lost it and demanded that we pick a theme so she could start designing the front cover and main articles. We’d done as much as we could do with the Magic: The Gathering piece, several photo pages, and Galaxy Nguyen’s enthusiastic weekly recaps of the year so far. It was almost getting to crunch time.

I followed Grace silently through the stacks, far deeper into the bowels of the library than we usually went, both of us too sleepy to talk.

There were no chairs or tables set up back here, so we sat cross-legged on the carpet, the pagination on the floor between us. Grace poured us tea—caramel and vanilla, she told me, nowhere near caffeinated enough to dezombify me at this ungodly hour—and then we went about silently numbering the little boxes, 1 to 30, each one representing a page in what would eventually become a full-fledged, tabloid-sized newspaper. Laid bare before us, it became clear that all of the usable content we’d accumulated so far only filled up about a third of the available space, even if we included the nine-thousand-word Magic: The Gathering feature story.